49 Fun Facts About Pulitzer Prize

Which rapper won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music?

Kendrick Lamar: earlier that year DAMN. had lost the Grammy for album of the year, yet it went on to win him the Pulitzer.

Which university administers the Pulitzer Prizes?

Columbia: its president Seth Low turned down Pulitzer's 1892 offer to fund a journalism school, and only his successor Nicholas Murray Butler embraced the plan.

Which World War II photograph won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography?

The Iwo Jima flag raising: Joe Rosenthal's shot of Marines hoisting the flag on Mount Suribachi became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial.

Joseph Pulitzer was born in which country?

Hungary: born in Makó, he tried to join the Austrian army, the French Foreign Legion and the British army, and all three turned him down.

Which Sinclair Lewis novel about an idealistic young doctor won a 1926 Pulitzer Prize that he refused?

Arrowsmith: Lewis turned the prize down, arguing such awards corrupt writers, yet in 1930 he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which Pulitzer category is a gold medal rather than cash, awarded only to a news organisation?

Public Service: The New York Times won it in 1972 for publishing the Pentagon Papers, which the Nixon administration had gone to court to suppress.

Which Toni Morrison novel won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

Beloved: that January, 48 Black writers and critics had published a protest in The New York Times Book Review after it lost the National Book Award.

Which novel won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a year after it was published?

To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee reworked it with her editor from a first draft titled Go Set a Watchman, which was finally published in 2015.

In 1965, the Pulitzer board rejected its music jury's call to honour which jazz composer?

Duke Ellington: then 66, he quipped that fate didn't want him to be too famous too young, and the board finally gave him a special citation in 1999.

Which newspaper's owner called the Pulitzers a 'mutual admiration society' and refused to compete until 1961?

Chicago Tribune: owner Robert McCormick saw the prizes as the work of East Coast cultural gatekeepers, so the paper sat them out from the late 1930s to 1960.

Which musical won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

Hamilton: Lin-Manuel Miranda began writing the show after reading Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton.

Which poet won a record four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry?

Robert Frost: he left Harvard after two years as a student, and decades later he returned there to teach.

Which program won the first Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting, in 2020?

This American Life: the show's team had earlier launched the podcast Serial as a spin-off.

Which James Michener book won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first year under that name?

Tales of the South Pacific: the renamed prize also let story collections compete, and Rodgers and Hammerstein turned the book into the musical South Pacific.

Which film dramatised the Boston Globe investigation into Catholic Church abuse cover-ups that won a 2003 Pulitzer?

Spotlight: after the Globe exposed the cover-up, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston in December 2002.

Which Pulitzer Prize administrator wrote the memoir behind Denzel Washington's film A Journal for Jordan?

Dana Canedy: her memoir grew out of a New York Times essay about her fiancé, a soldier killed in Iraq, and the journal he kept for their son.

In 1921 the Pulitzer trustees gave the fiction prize to The Age of Innocence over which novel?

Main Street: the jury had picked Sinclair Lewis's novel, and observers say he was still resentful when he turned down a Pulitzer of his own five years later.

Which Hemingway novel was recommended for the 1941 Pulitzer but blocked by the university president as offensive?

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Nicholas Murray Butler forced the board to change its vote, so no novel prize was given that year.

Which future president won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for a book believed ghostwritten by his speechwriter?

John F. Kennedy: in 1957 columnist Drew Pearson told Mike Wallace's television audience that the book had been ghostwritten for him.

Which Albee play did the 1963 Pulitzer jury pick before the board withheld the drama prize?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: the board objected to its profanity, and juror John Mason Brown, who had backed it with John Gassner, resigned in protest.

Which Thomas Pynchon novel did the 1974 Pulitzer fiction jury unanimously recommend, only for the board to give no award?

Gravity's Rainbow: board members privately called it unreadable, turgid, overwritten and in parts obscene.

Which Washington Post writer returned her 1981 Pulitzer after her story of a child heroin addict was found fabricated?

Janet Cooke: her invented eight-year-old addict was so convincing that Mayor Marion Barry had city police and health officials hunt for the boy.

Alex Haley settled a plagiarism suit over which book, honoured with a special Pulitzer citation in 1977?

Roots: Harold Courlander said it copied passages from his novel The African, and in the settlement Haley acknowledged that material from it found its way into Roots.

Which Tony-winning musical won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama despite not being among the jury's nominees?

Next to Normal: jury chair Charles McNulty publicly criticised the board for passing over the three plays his jury had nominated.

The introductory essay of which New York Times series won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary?

The 1619 Project: it grew into a school curriculum, which Florida officials later banned from the state's public schools.

As of 2026, which four authors have each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice?

Tarkington, Faulkner, Updike, Whitehead: Tarkington's first winner, The Magnificent Ambersons, was later adapted for the screen by Orson Welles.

Which Thornton Wilder novel won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel?

The Bridge of San Luis Rey: Tony Blair read from it at a 2001 memorial service for British victims of the September 11 attacks.

As of 2026, which two novelists share the record of four Pulitzer fiction nominations each?

Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth: Roth won once, for American Pastoral, but Oates has yet to win despite her four nominations.

Which Barbara Kingsolver novel shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Hernan Diaz's Trust?

Demon Copperhead: Kingsolver moved Dickens's David Copperfield to southern Appalachia, following a boy born to a teenage single mother in a trailer.

Which singer-songwriter received a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2008 for his impact on popular music?

Bob Dylan: when he won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature he stayed away from Stockholm, and the US ambassador to Sweden read his banquet speech.

From which financier did Joseph Pulitzer buy the New York World in 1883?

Jay Gould: the World was losing about $40,000 a year under him, so he was ready to sell.

Pulitzer's World fought a fierce 1890s circulation war with which rival publisher's paper?

William Randolph Hearst: within months of buying the Journal in 1895, he hired away much of the World's celebrated Sunday staff.

Young Pulitzer crossed the Atlantic in 1864 as a recruit for which army?

The Union army: learning that his recruiters were pocketing most of his enlistment bounty, he slipped away and enlisted in New York himself.

Pulitzer got his start in journalism at a St. Louis newspaper printed in which language?

German: he joined the Westliche Post as a reporter in 1868, then bought a share of the paper and soon resold it at a profit.

Which animals did Pulitzer care for in one of his first jobs in St. Louis?

Mules: he also waited tables and drove a hack before a newspaper took him on as a reporter.

Pulitzer turned to New York after what happened at his Post-Dispatch in 1882?

His editor shot a man dead: public outrage over the killing of lawyer Alonzo Slayback helped push Pulitzer toward New York.

An 1885 fundraising campaign in Pulitzer's New York World rescued which monument?

The Statue of Liberty: with its pedestal out of money, Pulitzer promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift.

Which pioneering investigative journalist did Pulitzer recruit to the World in 1887?

Nellie Bly: after feigning insanity to get inside a New York asylum, she published an exposé that prompted reforms there.

Which hugely popular comic character did Pulitzer's World begin running in 1895?

The Yellow Kid: when a rival paper hired away its cartoonist, both papers ran the Kid, a rivalry said to have given yellow journalism its name.

Pulitzer was indicted for libelling Theodore Roosevelt and which tycoon over the Panama Canal?

J. P. Morgan: the courts dismissed the charges, and in 1911 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling for the World's publisher.

Which health problems forced Pulitzer to withdraw from daily management of his newspaper?

Blindness, depression and noise sensitivity: even after giving up the editorship, he kept a close watch over his papers' policies from his distant homes.

Pulitzer died in 1911 aboard his yacht in which harbour?

Charleston: twenty years after his death there, his heirs sold the World to the Scripps-Howard chain, which merged it into the World-Telegram.

Which puzzle did Pulitzer's New York World introduce in December 1913, two years after his death?

The crossword: Arthur Wynne's puzzle caught on so fast that by 1923 most leading American newspapers were running crosswords.

Which comic strip won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning?

Doonesbury: its politics led some newspapers to move it off the comics page and onto their editorial pages.

Which poet became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1950?

Gwendolyn Brooks: after a 1967 Black writers' conference at Fisk University, she left mainstream publishers for Black-owned presses.

Which novel won the 1960 fiction prize after the board overrode the jury's pick of Henderson the Rain King?

Advise and Consent: Allen Drury's first novel was later made into a film by Otto Preminger.

Which composer won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music for a ballet score?

Aaron Copland: he wrote the score for Martha Graham, who later took the ballet's name, Appalachian Spring, from a Hart Crane poem.

Which Vietnam War photograph won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography?

Saigon Execution: the picture came to haunt photographer Eddie Adams, who wrote, 'The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.'

Which Tennessee Williams play won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

A Streetcar Named Desire: Marlon Brando's stage Stanley Kowalski made him a star, and he played the role again in the 1951 film.